Wave Freakout Q:

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rats

rats

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Check out this shot of my kick drum track. This is what it looks like after a half hour or so of EQing and dynamics processing trying to fatten it up.

The wave kind of hangs to the right (like my johnson).

I believe the term to describe this phenomenon is DC offset?

Does cool edit have a cure for this?
 

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Occasionally I get waveforms that are sort of truncated below the median line, and the peaks all occur above the line. I've asked about it, and people generally say something like 'dc offset but don't worry if it sounds okay'.

So what does it sound like?
 
OK. But it BOTHERS me.:confused:

I haven't quite got that far but I read that DC offset will degrade the audio quality when converted to MP3 format. And who knows what else?
 
man...that IS weird. I have two questions, also:

1. How did that happen...? I wanna know too...strange looking for sure.

2. How the H did you do that picture?
 
I'm not really sure how it happened. It's some type of mutation that erupted and worstened after several layers of dynamics processing/ graphic EQ/ parametric EQ/ amplification.

The picture is easy. Just hit ALT+print screen (which will act as a copy) then open up paint or whatever program you want and paste it. Save as jpeg, bit map, gif, whatever.
 
A related note: male voices will stay centered, while female voices will do.... that.... THING. The DC offset thing. More than the guys' voices will ever do.

Picked that up at the radio station, and I may have it reversed (male does it more than female, dunno). But I definitely remember somehow that the vox of male and female voices have different offsets, and could see it on the CEP screen when I first learned it.

wish i were around more, but the soundcard is still crapped and the band is getting to that lethargic stage where you concentrate more on not slashing tires and instead just play and go on with life. hope to see all of you soon. :( can't wait to hear your stuff, rats!
 
Thanks dob that was informative! I don't think cool edit pro has a DC Offset fixer so I guess I'll try the "Apply a steep high-pass filter that cuts off everything below 20 Hz or so" trick. I'll let you know how it goes!:D
 
yea.. dc is every frequency below 10hz.. they can get pissy high and you won't even notice them and they'll screw up yo' speakers and shit like that if you aren't carefull.. some analogue oscillators creates these buggers too..

there is a dc filter somewhere in cooledit, i think it's in the normalizer??
anyway.. you must have done some pretty weird eq'ing there rats.. are you sho' you didn't just let off a fart when you recorded that bass drum?
 
Rats, Cool's got it - it's called Adjust for DC. Right click on your meter bar at the bottom of the screen - it's a menu option on the popup.
 
My Two Cents

There is a preset in Amplify which states "center" wav... I apply this to everything I record because the data falls slightly above the red line..
another thing you can do is look at the statistics of the wav form under
Analyse --> Statistics..

it will tell you your current DC offset.. do the center wav preset and you'll find that this number will gradually reach 0.00%

Charon..
I hope this helps
:D
 
The male/female thing isn't necessarily a DC offset thing, the more I think about it. But it is related... what I was referring to was "one-sided spikes," in which the signal will appear to have tons of activity on one side of the centerline compared to the lesser activity of the other side. So it's not an offset, necessarily, but rather...

I dunno. Don't have the words for it. But if you record a woman's vocals and there's more activity on one side of "center," it's something that is characteristic of most womens' voices (as opposed to most mens'), and doesn't necessarily mean that something is "wrong."

Anybody know what this is called?
 
Yeah, it's called what I get once in a while on my waveforms.

You sayin' I sing like a girl?
 
Actually, since I DO have your CD (which IS wonderful, btw), I CAN see how perhaps your voice has this... characteristic. Seriously, you have a light voice and this may have something to do with this... THING that we're talking about.

How does your TRUMPET come over in CEP? I've noticed you use a LOT of "slide vocals" in your music; they're very stylistic and expressive. I can dig them a LOT!

Anyways, I can see how CEP thinks you're a girl.

:D

(heh heh)
 
dobro said:
Yeah, it's called what I get once in a while on my waveforms.

You sayin' I sing like a girl?
Click to expand...

actually this shouldn't happen in a perfect setup, but think about this : yo' mic is recording feedback from yo' voice and you be aither screaming ragefully into the mic or singing like a little scared girl who's afraid of hurting the mic..
now... if we have a center point from where the mic records the input (it doesn't... it's got a zero and upwards.. but yo' get the point) then image you yealling your bad breath into the mic constantly.. then we must expect the offset of the wave to be a little different from the center compared to the little scared girly voice which would have opposite effect... ... i think... that's what my logic tells me anway.. is the little scared girl good lookin' and where do i point her???
 
Kelly, the lip trumpet wavs look like the rest of the stuff, so it's not the falsetto thing that triggers the unbalanced wav.

When it happens, it's usually the whole track that's affected. Sometimes I get it when I'm singing off-axis.
 
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